The main reason why I don’t think your font doesn’t earn the hatred is because it is cleaner, easier to read. Closer to real handwriting. Subtle differences which the human brain groks.
As for Mistral, the biggest difference between it and Papyrus and Comic Sans is that it wasn’t one of the default fonts on a lot of systems like Papyrus (Mac OS X) and Comic Sans (Microsoft). Papyrus was OK, but overused so much simply because it was free. Mistral was often included in bundles, but IIRC it isn’t installed by default. Oh, and it does have the whole Eighties vibe since it was used so much then.
